Herbert West — Reanimator

H.P. Lovecraft

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To be dead, to be truly dead, must be glorious. There are far worse things awaiting man than death.

Count Dracula

Part I: From the Dark

Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme
terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the
whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third
year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and
diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell
is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with
reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school where West had already made
himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially.
His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic
nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after
the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated
immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college.
Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs but he
soon saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It
likewise became clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require
human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college
authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school
himself — the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old
resident of Arkham.

I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West’s pursuits, and we frequently discussed his theories, whose
ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical
process, and that the so-called “soul” is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend
only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with
organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or
intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of
death would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which would restore
vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shewn him that the natural and
artificial life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions
into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so
carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter
closely and reasoningly.

It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution to get fresh
human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him
discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves.
Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West
was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and
it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter’s field. We finally
decided on the potter’s field, because practically every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous
to West’s researches.

I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not only concerning
the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted
Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each
with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet
precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would
soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if discovery should
occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly
borrowed from the college — materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes — and provided spades and picks
for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was
too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance — even the small guinea-pig bodies from the
slight clandestine experiments in West’s room at the boarding-house.

We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular qualities. What we wanted
were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease,
and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything
suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college’s interest, as often as we
could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every case, so that it might be
necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end,
though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter’s field; a brawny young workman
drowned only the morning before in Summer’s Pond, and buried at the town’s expense without delay or embalming. That
afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.

It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that time the special
horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although
electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The
process of unearthing was slow and sordid — it might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of
scientists — and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered, West scrambled down
and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the
grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The affair made us rather nervous,
especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When
we had patted down the last shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman
place beyond Meadow Hill.

On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was
not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type —
large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired — a sound animal without psychological subtleties, and probably having vital
processes of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead; though the
expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had always longed for — a real dead
man of the ideal kind, ready for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and theories for
human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that there was scarcely a chance for anything like
complete success, and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation. Especially were
we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the creature, since in the space following death some of the more
delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious notions about the
traditional “soul” of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered
what sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully restored to
life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer
than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body’s arm, immediately binding the incision
securely.

The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his stethoscope to the specimen,
and bore the negative results philosophically. After about three-quarters of an hour without the least sign of life he
disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try one
change in the formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar, and would
have to fill it by dawn — for although we had fixed a lock on the house, we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a
ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would not be even approximately fresh the next night. So taking the solitary
acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to
the mixing of a new solution; the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.

The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one test-tube to another, and
West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from
the pitch-black room we had left there burst the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had
ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the
agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of
animate nature. Human it could not have been — it is not in man to make such sounds — and without a thought of our late
employment or its possible discovery, both West and I leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning
tubes, lamp, and retorts, and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves
as we stumbled frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint —
just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home from a debauch.

We did not separate, but managed to get to West’s room, where we whispered with the gas up until dawn. By then we
had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and plans for investigation, so that we could sleep through the
day — classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper, wholly unrelated, made it again impossible
for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman house had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that we could
understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to disturb a new grave in the potter’s field, as
if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould very
carefully.

And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and complain of fancied footsteps
behind him. Now he has disappeared.

Part II: The Plague–Daemon

I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the
halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most recall the year, for
truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there
is a greater horror in that time — a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.

West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and my
friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After
the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical
dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and
had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave in the potter’s field to a deserted
farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.

I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he thought would to
some extent restore life’s chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly — in a delirium of fear which we
gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves — and West had never afterward been able to shake off a
maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to
restore normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and the burning of the old house had prevented us
from burying the thing. It would have been better if we could have known it was underground.

After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of the born scientist slowly
returned, he again became importunate with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of
fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain;
for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In
the radical theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight
form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal — almost diabolical — power of
the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then — and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And
now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has vanished.

West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term in a wordy dispute that did
less credit to him than to the kindly dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally
retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which
he wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound
elders should ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the possibility of reanimation,
was inexpressibly disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West’s logical temperament. Only greater
maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the “professor-doctor” type — the product of
generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow,
intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high-souled
characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their
intellectual sins — sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of
Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant
patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to
prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in
elaborate daydreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.

And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus. West and I had graduated
about the time of its beginning, but had remained for additional work at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham
when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had our degrees,
and were pressed frantically into public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past
management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming were
made in rapid succession, and even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the unembalmed
dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation — so many fresh
specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific mental and nervous
strain made my friend brood morbidly.

But West’s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all but closed, and every
doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished
himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others shunned
because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though
he seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion.
West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove
to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal
health regulations, he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting-room one night,
and in my presence injected a new modification of his solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at
the ceiling with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could rouse
it. West said it was not fresh enough — the hot summer air does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught
before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring misuse of the college
laboratory.

The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The
students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite
overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public
affair, for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and
spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though shaken by the death of his chief opponent,
chilled the rest of us with references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to various duties,
as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in “making a night of it.” West’s landlady saw us arrive at
his room about two in the morning, with a third man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined
and wined rather well.

Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was aroused by cries coming from West’s
room, where when they broke down the door, they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten,
scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants of West’s bottles and instruments around us. Only an open window
told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the
second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some strange garments in the room, but West upon regaining
consciousness said they did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for bacteriological analysis in
the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the
capacious fireplace. To the police we both declared ignorance of our late companion’s identity. He was, West nervously
said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial,
and West and I did not wish to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.

That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror — the horror that to me eclipsed the plague itself.
Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only
too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive
considerably after midnight — the dawn revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town
of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body
noted a trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the
gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.

The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind. Through the fevered
town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied
daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake —
in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that
crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like a malformed ape or
anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The
number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not been alive.

On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on Crane Street near the
Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations,
and when someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was quickly
spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected
without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the
local hospital amidst universal excitement and loathing.

For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac
savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a
padded cell for sixteen years — until the recent mishap, when it escaped under circumstances that few like to mention.
What had most disgusted the searchers of Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned — the
mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before
— the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.

To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it;
shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages, “Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh
enough!”

Part III: Six Shots by Moonlight

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be
sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a young
physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that
was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and
sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose our
house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as possible to the potter’s field.

Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our requirements were those resulting
from a life-work distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we were doctors only, but beneath the surface were aims of far greater
and more terrible moment — for the essence of Herbert West’s existence was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of
the unknown, in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the graveyard’s cold
clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among them fresh human bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these
indispensable things one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment.

West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with his hideous experiments. Gradually I
had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of college we had to keep together. It was not easy
to find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a practice in
Bolton — a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the
Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose our
house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers
from the closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter’s field by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a
narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could
get no nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district. We were not much
displeased, however, since there were no people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle
long, but we could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.

Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first — large enough to please most young doctors, and large
enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The mill-hands were of somewhat
turbulent inclinations; and besides their many natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us
plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar — the
laboratory with the long table under the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often injected
West’s various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from the potter’s field. West was experimenting madly
to find something which would start man’s vital motions anew after they had been stopped by the thing we call death,
but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution had to be differently compounded for different types —
what would serve for guinea-pigs would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens required large
modifications.

The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue would render perfect reanimation
impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough — West had had horrible experiences during his
secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results of partial or imperfect animation were much
more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first
daemoniac session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding menace; and West, though a
calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy
pursuit. He half felt that he was followed — a psychological delusion of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably
disturbing fact that at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive — a frightful carnivorous thing in a
padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another — our first — whose exact fate we had never learned.

We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton — much better than in Arkham. We had not been settled a week before we got
an accident victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly rational expression before
the solution failed. It had lost an arm — if it had been a perfect body we might have succeeded better. Between then
and the next January we secured three more; one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion, and one rather
shivery thing — it rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor; interments fell off, and
those that did occur were of specimens either too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and
their circumstances with systematic care.

One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come from the potter’s field. In Bolton
the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing — with the usual result. Surreptitious and
ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported.
This late winter night there had been such a match; evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had
come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to an
abandoned barn, where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent black form on the
floor.

The match had been between Kid O’Brien — a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most unHibernian hooked nose — and
Buck Robinson, “The Harlem Smoke.” The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination shewed us that he would
permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling
fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon.
The body must have looked even worse in life — but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful
crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were grateful
when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly — for a purpose I knew too
well.

There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and carried it home between us
through the deserted streets and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing one horrible night in Arkham. We approached
the house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it
for the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary
patrolman of that section.

The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive to every solution we
injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as the hour grew
dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the others — dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of
the woods near the potter’s field, and buried it there in the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The
grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen — the thing which had risen of itself and
uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain
that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.

The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought rumours of a suspected fight
and death. West had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a case which ended very
threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child — a lad of five who had strayed off early
in the morning and failed to appear for dinner — and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak
heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly
superstitious, and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o’clock in the evening she had
died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not
saving her life. Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and
oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still missing as
the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods, but most of the family’s friends were busy with the
dead woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have been tremendous. Thoughts of the
police and of the mad Italian both weighed heavily.

We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town,
and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night before were ever tracked down. It
might mean the end of all our local work — and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did not like those rumours of a
fight which were floating about. After the clock had struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without
rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door.

I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West’s rap on my door. He was clad in dressing-gown and
slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he was thinking
more of the crazed Italian than of the police.

“We’d better both go,” he whispered. “It wouldn’t do not to answer it anyway, and it may be a patient — it would be
like one of those fools to try the back door.”

So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that which comes only from the
soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached the door I cautiously
unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly down on the form silhouetted there, West did a
peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded police
investigation — a thing which after all was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our cottage — my friend
suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.

For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic
misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares — a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours,
covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a
snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.

Part IV: The Scream of the Dead

The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West which harassed
the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man’s scream should give horror, for
it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this
occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I
became afraid.

Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the usual routine of a
village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near the
potter’s field. Briefly and brutally stated, West’s sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life
and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution. For this
ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh human bodies; very fresh because even
the least decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human because we found that the solution had to be
compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea-pigs had been killed and treated,
but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse
sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just departed; bodies with every cell
intact and capable of receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this
second and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary
natural life would not respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct — the
specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely dead.

The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham,
vividly conscious for the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West
looked scarcely a day older now — he was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an
occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure
of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme; the results of defective
reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by various
modifications of the vital solution.

One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness, and
run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome African
monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed — West had had to shoot that object. We could not get
bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was
disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived — that thought haunted us shadowingly, till
finally West disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the
isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid
than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.

It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents
in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all
likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle — that of artificial
preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised
that it had turned out well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could
help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we
secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creating his embalming compound for future rather than
immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when
we obtained the negro killed in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion there lay
in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on
reanimation, and whether we could hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to predict. The
experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both might share
the spectacle in accustomed fashion.

West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a well-dressed stranger just off the
train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town had been long, and
by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories, his heart had become greatly
overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be
expected, seemed to West a heaven-sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was
unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis,
apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be restored to
life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the
potter’s field. If, on the other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established.
So without delay West had injected into the body’s wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my
arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperilled the success of our experiment, did not
appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before — a rekindled spark of
reason and perhaps a normal, living creature.

So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory and gazed at a white, silent
figure beneath the dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly
at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to seek West’s assurance that the thing
was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough; reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used
without careful tests as to life, since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West
proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy so vast
that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in
the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to
neutralise the compound and release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution might freely
work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a
pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for
our attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness,
withdrew satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared
during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and groping. I
cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen — the
first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the
unfathomable abyss.

West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena;
consequently he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death’s barrier. I did not
wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers;
so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides — I could not
extract from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the deserted
farmhouse at Arkham.

Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of colour came to
cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on
the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror
inclined above the body’s mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and
visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering. Then the lids opened,
shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.

In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears; questions of other worlds of which the
memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think the last one, which I repeated,
was: “Where have you been?” I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped
mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables which I would
have vocalised as “only now” if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was
elated with the conviction that the one great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated corpse
had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt
that the solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate
life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors — not horror of the thing that
spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined.

For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated at the memory of
its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with the air, and suddenly collapsing
into a second and final dissolution from which there could be no return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally
in my aching brain:

Part V: The Horror From the Shadows

Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the battlefields of
the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea, while still
others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark; yet despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate
the most hideous thing of all — the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.

In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many
Americans to precede the government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army on my own initiative,
but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was — the celebrated Boston
surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when
the chance had come, he carried me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I could have been glad to
let the war separate us; reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West more and more
irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague’s influence secured a medical commission as Major, I
could not resist the imperious persuasion of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.

When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either naturally warlike or
anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and
spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There
was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it had had to assume a military
exterior. What he wanted was not a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the peculiar branch of
medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and
occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply of freshly killed men in
every stage of dismemberment.

Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of the dead. This work was not known to
the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston; but was only too well known
to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant since the old days in Miskatonic University Medical School at
Arkham. It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then on
human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead things, and if they
were fresh enough they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula, for each
type of organism was found to need a stimulus especially adapted to it. Terror stalked him when he reflected on his
partial failures; nameless things resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain
number of these failures had remained alive — one was in an asylum while others had vanished — and as he thought of
conceivable yet virtually impossible eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.

West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful specimens, and had accordingly
resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in body-snatching. In college, and during our early practice together in
the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his boldness
in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then
there came a nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a certain specimen had been a living body
when he secured it. That was the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a
corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely hardened him.

Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him by sheer force of fear, and
witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than
anything he did — that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly
degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became
a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial
monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid
intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment — a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.

Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had proved his point that
rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached
parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue
separated from natural physiological systems; and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form of never-dying,
artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical reptile. Two
biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle — first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action
be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind
of ethereal, intangible relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of
what has previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a prodigious supply of freshly
slaughtered human flesh — and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.

The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a field hospital behind the lines
of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private
laboratory in an east room of the barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and
radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst of
his gory wares — I could never get used to the levity with which he handled and classified certain things. At times he
actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and
philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned.
Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots — surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an
hospital. Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience. Besides human tissue,
West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better than
human material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend’s chief activity. In a dark
corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian
cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.

On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen — a man at once physically powerful and of such high
mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West
to his commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the theory
of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham–Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our
division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the heavy fighting reached headquarters. He
had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his
destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the
great surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing which
had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he finished severing the head, placed it in his
hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body
on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the headless neck, and
closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer’s uniform. I
knew what he wanted — to see if this highly organised body could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental
life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham–Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now
gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.

I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm
of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe — I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full
of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous
reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far
corner of black shadows.

The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was expected of it; and as a few
twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West’s face. He was ready, I think, to see
proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the
brain — that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less
complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of
myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The arms
stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the
headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably one of desperation — an intelligent desperation
apparently sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man’s last act in
life; the struggle to get free of the falling aeroplane.

What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination from the shock caused at that
instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German shell-fire — who can gainsay
it, since West and I were the only proved survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance, but
there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence
itself was very simple, notable only for what it implied.

The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I should not call that
sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message
— it had merely screamed, “Jump, Ronald, for God’s sake, jump!” The awful thing was its source.

For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows.

Part VI: The Tomb–Legions

When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely. They
suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the truth
because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities beyond the
credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to
admit of perfect secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy which make even
me doubt the reality of what I saw.

I was West’s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in medical school, and from
the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the
veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore
involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of the experiments — grisly masses
of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous animation. These were the usual
results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could
possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.

This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day he had
secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had
transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had
emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and
calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became
acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they
noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.

West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of furtiveness and dread of
every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching
on certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life
depart. He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was
that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham professor’s body
which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton,
where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were things less easy to speak
of — for in later years West’s scientific zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent
his chief skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic matter
other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not
even be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of
West.

In saying that West’s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its complex nature. Part of it
came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from apprehension of the
bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation — of them
all, West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle fear — a very
fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe
battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham–Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew about his experiments
and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the
trunk might be investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk
had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come
from the detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a way — but
West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering
conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.

West’s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest burying-grounds in
Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments
were of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in
a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete
disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from the morbid experiments
and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly
ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known
sepulchre therein. After a number of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb
of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied the nitrous, dripping
walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the
uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West’s new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and
he betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till that
final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of West’s decadence, but must add that it was
a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last — calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired,
with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm
even when he thought of that clawed grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing
that gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.

The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious glance between the
newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had
seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles
away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had
entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure who talked without
moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His
expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light
fell on it — for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger
man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had
asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused, gave
a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not
flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could recall the event
without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the
wax-faced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had vanished.

From the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost paralysed. At midnight the doorbell rang,
startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police,
there was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they
deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice, “Express — prepaid.” They filed out
of the house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient
cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at
the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West’s correct name and present address. It also bore the inscription,
“From Eric Moreland Clapham–Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders.” Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon
the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham–Lee, and upon the detached head which — perhaps — had uttered articulate
sounds.

West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, “It’s the finish — but let’s
incinerate — this.” We carried the thing down to the laboratory — listening. I do not remember many particulars — you
can imagine my state of mind — but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West’s body which I put into the
incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any
sound come from the box, after all.

It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb masonry had been
covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and
smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I
saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity — or
worse — could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all — the horde was
grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the
breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful
head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter
a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that
subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West’s head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian
officer’s uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their
first touch of frantic, visible emotion.

Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only unidentifiable ashes.
Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor
the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken plaster
wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer — probably I am mad. But I
might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.

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